Digital Public Sphere and Women: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Reader’s Online Comments on the Column “the Other Half”published in ‘the Hindu

Abstract

Mainstream media content on socially crucial issues generates more discussions and debates in online platforms. The online news sites encourage reader’s participation by means of enabling them to like, share, comment on the content. This paves way for the readers’ engagement with the content as well as other readers. The chain of comments continues to grow sometimes to more than hundreds or thousands of comments. This phenomenon initiates a public discussion on the online news platforms. It is interesting and vital to know the public opinion on socially crucial content based on their online participation. This paper analyses the online comments of readers on the content exclusively written on women issues, the column in the daily, The Hindu by Kalpana Sharma. Using Critical Discourse Analysis as the theoretical and methodological background this paper analyses the user generated content